Crotchet Man

I feel like I should say something about the bomb and youth camp massacre in Norway, but it was only a couple of weeks ago that I explicitly stated my complicated position on child murder and I fear repeating myself. In case you don't want to read the whole thing, I will sum up: I'm not for it.

Too glib by half considering the grotesque tragedy of the situation to be sure, but I'm finding it more and more difficult to engage in the daily course of the news as time passes. I almost said "as I get older" but I'm not completely sure that's the main reason. Plenty of old people follow the news. Sure, it's pretty specific news mostly related to prescription drug pricing, Social Security benefits and the enduring, unfeeling laziness of fucking ungrateful grandchildren who apparently have forgotten how to operate the telephone, which is ironic considering when they do visit (five whole minutes, whoop-de-doo), it isn't actually possible to get them to stop for a second staring at the things with the texting and the other thing with the bird logo I forget what and oof, my sciatica...

But it still counts as news and it still counts as engagement. Irrationally angry still = engaged and a vote for cynical populist demagogues waving the Scythe of Death still counts as voting. So as much as I'd like to blame my relative disconnection from the pull of the informational tide on the diminishing gravity signature accompanying the wasting frailty of geronticity, I'm afraid to say the idea does not, as it were, hold water. There's a joke in there about old people and urinary incontinence, but I feel like I'm working way too hard as it is.

I think the main problem is that I'm reaching the point of total crisis exhaustion. Some of it is from the actual events on the ground from the ongoing wars and climate change and economic floundering. Some of it is the nature of modern media, which we no longer imbibe but are obligated to wade through. And some of it is just the entrenchment all around. Everyone's bunkered in, ideologically speaking. At just about any hour, you can find a public servant on some level in front of a television camera or radio microphone someone insisting that whatever issue s/he happens to be championing/opposing is the great and irreduceable crux upon which the survival of our civilization depends. I want very much to say "it's just a sewer usage rate increase we're talking about, councilman, we're going to be OK," but then I'm a traitor and an enemy and someone invokes Ronald Reagan, etc.

So I'd like to just be sad about murdered children in this case, but no, it's actually the scourge of liberal fascism that should, it seems, preclude me from just expressing regular, decent human sympathy for dead people. And, if you have any kind of Google-fu at all, you'll know it's now a whole debate about Christianity vs. Christianism, Fundamentalism vs. Nationalism, Crazy vs. Evil...

I'm tired. It's easy to get discouraged. Especially when the one good thing that might come out of this--a recognition that fanaticism is fanaticism, transcending cultures and religions--is largely undone because something like this comes out and we're right back to where we started with terror = Muslim, and worse, "infiltrating" our own Armed Forces. Can't win for losing.

In the face of all this dire-ness, I catch myself sometimes longing for a simpler time, when I was younger.  Which doesn't just make me officially old, but is the animating principle of conservatism. I don't think I have to tell you which of those processes is scarier.